Reviews

Rated 2.5 / 5 stars2012-12-19 13:36:11

Good work, and nice attempt - this was a decent game. Just decent though; not good, nor great, I'm afraid. Also, since it seems you've got some obvious Alicesoft influences, I'll be throwing some terms around; hopefully you're familiar with them.

First, the interface feels laggy. Even if it isn't, everything, particularly the numbers (as in recruitng and trading). It works, and does its job splendidly, but it just feels off and creates a sense of annoyance that hinders enjoyment. You might want to work on making things more smoother for better user experience.

Second, the game's biggest problem is that it's too annoying. Let's take the order system, for example. Order worked in BBA, because you could auto-assign characters, and had a shitton of characters to throw around. In this game, you have to manually go around each province and send characters to restore order each time. This doesn't seem big at first, but once you have 4~5 provinces, it becomes annoying. By the time you reach 8~10....

Perhaps it's a way to limit player snowballing past a certain extent, or to force players to hire more heroes, etc. But whatever it is, it gets repetitive and frustrating - which, in my opinion is bad game design.

This issue lies in other mechanics, like replenshing your troops after a battle (where there is no convenient one-button solution like Rance VII), to enemy attacks - which are not even threatening at all, because you'll be able to block them off so easily that it's a joke, and etc. You need to somehow deal with repetitive manual actions that underlie many of the mechanics.

Third, there's no goals or anything like that. Of course, you've got Japan domination, with sequential events like invading Yamato first if you don't want to be raped, etc. However, without smaller goals to achieve than simply Japan domination, it feels pointless. There aren't characters to clear, or women to rape like in RanceVII. There's no satisfaction in bringing down that big bad Takeda that's been raping your ass, etc. It's just wait, build troops, destroy next house, then rinse and repeat until the (eventual) victory, waaay over the horizon.

Finally, warfare, sucks. It seems you wanted to add some kind of strategic management with distances but... there's the fundamental problem of only one attack at a time. You attack, defend, attack, defend, etc. Rance VII was better in this regard, since you had multiple battles to fight in a single turn, so you couldn't throw your entire army behind a single battle. Not here; Here, every battle is decisive - if you lose, you're anhilated, if you win, you win, so you send every men you have, and so does the enemy; everything after that is just mopup. Therefore, you end up falling into a pattern of repetitive action. And there's little variation to affect it.

I must admit that I only played until I conquered 10 provinces in. The level of micromanagement was too overwhelming past that. Perhaps things get better after that, but if noone can reach that point, it's pointless; pardon the pun.

Next time, I'd like to suggest you review "Great War of Prefectures" to see what you do better. It's a similar game at core, except for two things - the minigame which makes battles less of numbers v. numbers, and a difficulty level that keeps you engaging to the end. Of course, it's easy to win, but it takes effort to get there, and not the kind of effort where you have to micromanage everything to win.

Rated 3 / 5 stars2012-12-12 15:37:15

Rated 4 / 5 stars2012-12-11 23:34:22

Found something that could be considered a bug. If you are going to be attacked and you use all your officers the week before the attack, you are stuck at the defense screen without the ability to do anything except close the game.